What I am saying is - to have the availability of full service rescue is extremely costly for a rural area to provide and may not be feasible when you don't have a population base to spread out the costs.

What works on the coasts, does not necessarily work in the intermountain.

You and I may not expect to be taken care of. But, many folks put themselves in harms way and expect to be bailed out. This Tennessee fire MAY be an example of that.

This subject, the way I see it: "Is it the responsibility of small, municipal governments to provide emergency services even if they may not be reimbursed?"

The thing to remember is that our realities are moving more in that direction. In proof of my point, I seriously doubt you could find a Republican that would support an increase in taxation of any kind. One has to keep in mind that they don't recognize the practical responsibilities of running much of local and state government services, and if the truth be told, they could give a crap.

This is absolutely NOT true in the rural west and upper mid-west. Of course at election time, it may sound like this, if you watch any TV campaign ads.

A lot of the small governements in this area are Republican run. There is very little difference between the two major parties methods of running small governments here IMO.

Coboardhead, Thank you for introducing a dose of reality into the discussion. It would be a refreshing change if posters would refrain from making sweeping generalizations based upon nothing but their own poorly informed biases.

Or not. Why should some couch potato city dweller be responsible for my safety when I race dirt bikes across remote SE Utah deserts or WS two miles west of Oregon?

I know you're not reading this but thanks for the fine example.

Firstly, no-one is suggesting others be responsible for your safety. Not even the cost of the actual rescue.

It is about the cost of having organizations in place with trained personnel, equipment, salaries etc. to make any rescue possible.

When you do assume risks, and everyone does all the time, even those working on their cholesterol level in front of the TV, you become a customer - even if everything goes well and you don't crash your dirt bike.

Now, narrowly defining the pool of risk-takers in order to allocate cost precisely will either be retroactive - (install credit card terminals in your SAR Helis), or proactive - pay upfront if you're going to take risks.

The latter, if optional, will invariably cause emergency responders to have to refuse rescue as in the house fire, or let the Utah tourist drown in Long Island.

The former arguably is piracy. Or, if you'll send the victim a bill afterwards an hope they'll pay up, futile.

I therefore will gladly pay for the choppers in Utah as long as the same funds pay for my local USGC station. That's what spreading the risk is - you combine your efforts and maintain an adequate emergency response system._________________florian - ny22

coboardhead--it's nice to have some thoughtful commentary, and your perspective from rural Colorado is particularly valuable. In my experience, mostly in California, there is a disconnect between the espousal of personal responsibilities, and the actual practice. Many hold a view that land ownership is a fundamental right, and government should do little or nothing to restrict one's use of his or her own land. In practice in California, that means development in hazardous locations--the coast, floodplains, and most particularly in fire prone zones in our arid semi-Mediterranean climate.

If there were consistency in the private property rights philosophy, those who espouse the rights would take on the responsibility. That is usually not the case. Land is divided and then developed around urban areas, in configurations where development is not dense enough to either replace the fire-prone vegetation, or establish a tax base sufficient to support fire protection and supression. This happens because developers have a disproportionate influence in the generation of campaign money for local government. Then come the fire, the local government responds because the people that live at the urban fringe are well to do and politically influential. Ironically, term limits have exacerbated this trend because if the fire doesn't happen while you are in office you don't get blamed.

It is not just fire protection that incurs a loss in these circumstances--frequently other public services--flood protection, sewerage, and police service--all cost more to provide than are generated in a post-Proposition 13 world. The fire-prone scenario is widespread through California and other parts of the west, but is also repeated in flood prone and erosion prone areas.

There are other subsidies to such development. Flood protection is heavily subsidized--at the Federal level, although a number of attempts to put it on a sound actuarial basis. FEMA puts money into rebuilding, again without regard to actuarial basis. And any losses that are actually incurred are written off on your Federal income tax.

So I see a lot of lip service about private property rights and responsibility--and a lot of subsidy of the actual risk. It's nice to see the forum actually progress in discussion rather than simply shout slogans, thanks for your thoughtful posts.

Coboardhead, Thank you for introducing a dose of reality into the discussion. It would be a refreshing change if posters would refrain from making sweeping generalizations based upon nothing but their own poorly informed biases.

You're relatively new here, Mrgybe, so your naivete is understandable. However, injecting reality into these discussions is not new. It has been tried at great length, in thousands of posts from many people, in this and other forums over the past decade plus, with only one result, with no exaggeration: it taught most rational conservative posters to regard the vast majority of ONLINE liberals as subhuman.

I will never forget Paul Braunbehrens' 2006 rec.windsurfing response to Brian Foster's typically polite discussion of pollution visa vis supreme couurt nominations:
Brian: "We can all agree that pollution sucks ... I've been seeing it with my own eyes since the late 70s and it looks like no one has made progress toward it. There have been Reps and Dems around the whole time and NO ONE did the job ... we are putting really toxic disgusting stuff in our waters. Ö I don't support the extreme environmentalists either because they are too anti progress and anti business. There is usually a place in the middle we can agree on ... There is more work to do."

<irrelevant snippage; Google it if you think it matters. >

Paul: ďGod damn, Brian. I really think you should just STFU.Ē

Had that been a face to face conversation and Brian was intimidated, I would have shut Paul down by whatever means were required. Iíve never physically assaulted anyone in my life, but I fucking will not stand silently by and let someone on either side of the fence get bullied like that. People who tolerate that in silence are part of the problem.

Multiply that by literally a few thousand in quantity and up to 5 in intensity, and you have a collective, representative idea of how the left behaves IN JUST A FEW WS BULLETIN BOARDS ALONE (e.g., rec.windsurfing, the supposedly moderated Yahoo group PacNW Windsurfing (sic?), and this supposedly moderated bulletin board). If I were not able to killfile them at will, I would long ago have complied with the request from Weatherflow management to build and document a body of evidence to support their eviction from this bulletin board. (Sorry, WF, but cleaning up the trash you let in is not your customersí responsibility, and you compound your culpability by having moderators who admit they censor some posts based simply on their political tilt.)

I was heavily praised for ďgrace under pressureĒ a decade ago (and still get that via PMs and in person), once even nominated as a POTUS candidate, for my restrained responses in the face of full frontal attack beginning the day some rec.w miscreants discovered my politics are right of center. You may have noticed that Iím not so restrained now (I wouldnít swear online, or call anyone a ratbag, before encountering these GD ratbags), and itís for good reason: restrained responses have zero effect on the particular brand of liberal so heavily represented in these forums. Iíve had to conceal my identity on some medical and professional forums after some of the rec.windsurfing scum stalked me across the internet into other forums. ďUninformed generalized biasesĒ my butt; most of the people Iíve killfiled, a couple I havenít, and many Iíve met in person have produced a bias, for damned sure, but itís far from uninformed or overly generalized. My bias is against people who specialize in unfounded personal attacks against individuals in lieu of rational discourse, is well and clearly earned by many people, and is applied only when and where deserved.

If Coboardhead is being treated with respect by these people, itís strictly because he so clearly leans their way, even if only moderately, on just about anything but Ocare. I couldnít care less whether he or anyone else is liberal or conservative; itís behavior, not political persuasion, that matters most to me.

Last edited by isobars on Thu Oct 14, 2010 3:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

Thanks for spending the time and effort clearing that up iso. All twelve of us who actually read this forum thank you for the hours you spend typing away for....us! Time well spent!_________________/w\

I will never forget Paul Braunbehrens' 2006 rec.windsurfing response to Brian Foster's typically polite discussion of pollution visa vis supreme couurt nominations:
Brian: "We can all agree that pollution sucks ... I've been seeing it with my own eyes since the late 70s and it looks like no one has made progress toward it. There have been Reps and Dems around the whole time and NO ONE did the job ... we are putting really toxic disgusting stuff in our waters. Ö I don't support the extreme environmentalists either because they are too anti progress and anti business. There is usually a place in the middle we can agree on ... There is more work to do."

<irrelevant snippage; Google it if you think it matters. >

SNIP

More Ficktion from the master. For anyone who cares (and I'm wondering why I still do) Mike claims that Paul's statement was in response to Brian's post (as quoted in part by Mike). It was not.

Not only was Paul's post not responsive to the topic of Brian's in particular but it could not have been in response because Paul's post was earlier in time than the post of Brian.

Paul addressed Brian's comments regarding Justice Alito and it was posted on Jan. 12, 2006 at 2:40 Google time as post No. 30 in a thread of 72 posts. The post of Brian Foster quoted by Mike was made 3 days later, on January 15, 2006 at 10:48 as post No. 34.

Last edited by DanWeiss on Fri Oct 15, 2010 3:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

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